12 ms·

Looking at some of the for and against arguments regarding patents, let's play a mental game: would new, valuable things still be created if the patent system d

Looking at some of the for and against arguments regarding patents, let's play a mental game: would new, valuable things still be created if the patent system didn't exist? I think yes. The creator wouldn't necessarily benefit directly, but in a way we all indirectly benefit from new technology and ideas. Much the same as it would be better for the poor to have free or affordable essential health care, our society would have more able-bodied and able-minded people to work or even conduct themselves in a way that didn't transmit their illness, whether physically or through dependance. By leaving the weak weakened, we indirectly transmit that ailment to others by physical and economic forces. You're only as strong as your weakest point.

mtgx 11y ago
That's nice, but if I'm Turing Pharmaceuticals or Microsoft, I probably don't care about all of that, and I only care about my immediate gain and exploitation of the patent system.
- icanhackit 11y ago
  So perhaps the innovation could be in the process, not the result?
epmatsw 11y ago
I think that's a misleading question. I don't think anyone is arguing that all innovation would go away if the patent system was removed. However, it seems possible that innovations that require high initial investment and low ongoing costs (medications, gene patents, etc.) would be produced at a lower rate if the incentives the current system provides were removed.
- icanhackit 11y ago
  it seems possible that innovations that require high initial investment and low ongoing costs (medications, gene patents, etc.) would be produced at a lower rate Good point, I don't necessarily disagree. But is a lot of the R&D to get around existing patents, rather than build a new thing entirely? In the software world I think we can safely say yes. Regarding medical research I'm not qualified to say. I'd love to hear from anyone with some insight.
  - epmatsw 11y ago
    That's an interesting counterpoint. I honestly don't know the answer either.
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    "A way to work around a patent" means "a different way to do something". Much of the time, that's no gain, but sometimes they find a better way to do something. So figuring out ways to work around patents is not just a complete waste.
- nickbauman 11y ago
  Big investments (today it's things like the Internet, Space Exploration; long ago it was the Roman naval assault bridge, the Library of Alexandria) always require state-led investment for sustainability. Copying protection have almost nothing to do with them.
  - caskance 11y ago
    The protection IS a state investment. It's just contributing the threat of resources rather than actual resources, which is even more efficient.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  I'm actually wondering how much of the R&D effort stems from actual reverse engineering of the medicine and how much is simply done by reading the patent. Chemistry is quite complicated if you break down the pill into it's basic components it won't tell you much. Even if you manage to isolate the active molecule you still will have to figure out the chemical process to make it and in a safe manner. Chemical patents tend to be quite long because it's quite a complicated manner, and all of them have a full description of how the compound was identified, how it's made, and how it's delivered. Now many drugs are also not as complicated as some people might think, the majority of the work that drug companies do it pretty much see what works for what, however for the complicated stuff that they actually R&D from the ground up the patents might be an actual liability when it comes to reverse engineering when they cannot use the law to enforce it. As for the money, as long as rich people get sick drug companies will continue to do research, allot of the money for the research also comes from government grants and not from investments drug companies would rather produce drugs for illnesses that affect as many people as possible and drugs that combat the symptoms and not the cause where ever possible if we want to be completely cynical about it because that's what would yield them the most amount of money. If government and private grants weren't available all we'll get in a cynical world would be common cold and cold sore medicine that doesn't really combat either viruses just prevents us from coughing and treats the sores. And that is almost the world we are living in because drug companies and investors won't be dumping resources into some obscure syndrome that affects 800 people in the US, for that we have the sick billionaires son and the sick nephew of a senator's best friend to thank for.
- scotty79 11y ago
  Tell that to ebola victims of last few decades. All this time all these wonderful incentives being in place and no progress on the cure. Americans get one good scare and presto, ebola vaccine in a less than a year. I wasn't that hard was it? Maybe those wonderful incentives are heavily misaligned with what desirable for humanity. Unless you thing that over-medicating Americans with vaguely effective but well advertised psycho drugs is preferable to preventing people from dying from ebola...
hyperpallium 11y ago
A couple of centuries ago there was a movement to abolish patents. What stopped it was cheap imports threatening jobs - patents acted as a kind of import duty. Curiously, that was their origin.
- icanhackit 11y ago
  Relevant: Gongkai https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10353444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10353444
rayiner 11y ago
The question is: what kind of valuable things would still be produced? You'll still get iPhones, but will you get ARM cores or Snapdragon chipsets or LTE or MPEG4 or pills that cure Hep-C? The bigger picture is that almost all hard R&D takes place under the umbrella of some sort of protection from copying. Intel spends billions a year on semiconductor R&D, and protects it with trade secrets. Pharma companies spend billions on drug R&D and protect them with patents. Even internet companies like Google and Facebook depend on being able to hide a lot of their "secret sauce" (either algorithms or compilations of user information) on the server-side where it can't be easily copied. Hard R&D that isn't protected from copying is usually subsidized. The core internet protocols were subsidized by the Government. Advances in core browser protocols are subsidized by Internet companies that rely heavily on ad revenue. Going back further in history, Bell Labs was subsidized by AT&T's telephone monopoly and PARC was subsidized by Xerox's copier monopoly. That model can work too, but has its own problems.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  We could ask, though, which R&D gets protected by patents but not by copyright or trade secrets? Which R&D would not produce a return on investment if patents didn't exist? Drug research, perhaps, though we might be able to find other solutions there, or produce a much more limited form of patent for that industry alone. What else currently depends fundamentally on patents for its business model? Looking at the many groups working on FOSS media codecs past and present (VP8, VP9, AoM, Opus, Vorbis), I'd say the media situation would actually get better in the absence of patents.
  - rancur 11y ago
    media requires algorithm which isn't supposed to be patentable but because software is sOoOo complex it got shoehorned into patentability. I think we just need to loosen up the ties a little
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Marketing is at least as important as technology. Intel sells chips, not because there are no alternatives, but because they're Intel. There will be little or no impact on innovation by this patent change.
radu_floricica 11y ago
This is a bad question and a horrible attempt to answer (I'm being so abrasive because at this moment this is the highest voted comment). It's a bad question because it invites wishful thinking. Prediction generally has a very bad track record, and right now you're trying to predict a mixture of economy, free market incentives and technology. Hard to find something more unpredictable. What you can do is look at the past and find correlation and causation. It's reasonably straightforward. Take a number of drugs and treatments, best if done randomly. See the process that got them on the market, and try to figure where patents fit in the picture. I tried it just for fun, and found something interesting: up to half a century ago, you had a person's name associated with a drug. More recently, and you have a company. This is not an answer, but a hint that maybe things move towards being more expensive. Which of course brings us to the regulatory process: once a drug identified, what is the cost of having the papers stamped and who is motivated to pay for it?
jerednel 11y ago
Wasn't the completion of the genome in the first place a public effort that actually beat the private sector's attempts to finish it first and keep it away from scientific research? So not sure what we'd lose from keeping it open.
SilasX 11y ago
You can always waive IP rights in a system that reverse is not true (i.e. conditionally opt-in to IP rights in a system that categorically rejects them). Likewise, you can give away all the physical stuff you want, but it's great that the rights exist in the first place.

mtgx 11y ago

That's nice, but if I'm Turing Pharmaceuticals or Microsoft, I probably don't care about all of that, and I only care about my immediate gain and exploitation of the patent system.

icanhackit 11y ago
So perhaps the innovation could be in the process, not the result?

epmatsw 11y ago

I think that's a misleading question. I don't think anyone is arguing that all innovation would go away if the patent system was removed. However, it seems possible that innovations that require high initial investment and low ongoing costs (medications, gene patents, etc.) would be produced at a lower rate if the incentives the current system provides were removed.

icanhackit 11y ago
it seems possible that innovations that require high initial investment and low ongoing costs (medications, gene patents, etc.) would be produced at a lower rate Good point, I don't necessarily disagree. But is a lot of the R&D to get around existing patents, rather than build a new thing entirely? In the software world I think we can safely say yes. Regarding medical research I'm not qualified to say. I'd love to hear from anyone with some insight.
- epmatsw 11y ago
  That's an interesting counterpoint. I honestly don't know the answer either.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  "A way to work around a patent" means "a different way to do something". Much of the time, that's no gain, but sometimes they find a better way to do something. So figuring out ways to work around patents is not just a complete waste.
nickbauman 11y ago
Big investments (today it's things like the Internet, Space Exploration; long ago it was the Roman naval assault bridge, the Library of Alexandria) always require state-led investment for sustainability. Copying protection have almost nothing to do with them.
- caskance 11y ago
  The protection IS a state investment. It's just contributing the threat of resources rather than actual resources, which is even more efficient.
dogma1138 11y ago
I'm actually wondering how much of the R&D effort stems from actual reverse engineering of the medicine and how much is simply done by reading the patent. Chemistry is quite complicated if you break down the pill into it's basic components it won't tell you much. Even if you manage to isolate the active molecule you still will have to figure out the chemical process to make it and in a safe manner. Chemical patents tend to be quite long because it's quite a complicated manner, and all of them have a full description of how the compound was identified, how it's made, and how it's delivered. Now many drugs are also not as complicated as some people might think, the majority of the work that drug companies do it pretty much see what works for what, however for the complicated stuff that they actually R&D from the ground up the patents might be an actual liability when it comes to reverse engineering when they cannot use the law to enforce it. As for the money, as long as rich people get sick drug companies will continue to do research, allot of the money for the research also comes from government grants and not from investments drug companies would rather produce drugs for illnesses that affect as many people as possible and drugs that combat the symptoms and not the cause where ever possible if we want to be completely cynical about it because that's what would yield them the most amount of money. If government and private grants weren't available all we'll get in a cynical world would be common cold and cold sore medicine that doesn't really combat either viruses just prevents us from coughing and treats the sores. And that is almost the world we are living in because drug companies and investors won't be dumping resources into some obscure syndrome that affects 800 people in the US, for that we have the sick billionaires son and the sick nephew of a senator's best friend to thank for.
scotty79 11y ago
Tell that to ebola victims of last few decades. All this time all these wonderful incentives being in place and no progress on the cure. Americans get one good scare and presto, ebola vaccine in a less than a year. I wasn't that hard was it? Maybe those wonderful incentives are heavily misaligned with what desirable for humanity. Unless you thing that over-medicating Americans with vaguely effective but well advertised psycho drugs is preferable to preventing people from dying from ebola...

hyperpallium 11y ago

A couple of centuries ago there was a movement to abolish patents. What stopped it was cheap imports threatening jobs - patents acted as a kind of import duty. Curiously, that was their origin.

icanhackit 11y ago
Relevant: Gongkai https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10353444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10353444

rayiner 11y ago

The question is: what kind of valuable things would still be produced? You'll still get iPhones, but will you get ARM cores or Snapdragon chipsets or LTE or MPEG4 or pills that cure Hep-C? The bigger picture is that almost all hard R&D takes place under the umbrella of some sort of protection from copying. Intel spends billions a year on semiconductor R&D, and protects it with trade secrets. Pharma companies spend billions on drug R&D and protect them with patents. Even internet companies like Google and Facebook depend on being able to hide a lot of their "secret sauce" (either algorithms or compilations of user information) on the server-side where it can't be easily copied. Hard R&D that isn't protected from copying is usually subsidized. The core internet protocols were subsidized by the Government. Advances in core browser protocols are subsidized by Internet companies that rely heavily on ad revenue. Going back further in history, Bell Labs was subsidized by AT&T's telephone monopoly and PARC was subsidized by Xerox's copier monopoly. That model can work too, but has its own problems.

JoshTriplett 11y ago
We could ask, though, which R&D gets protected by patents but not by copyright or trade secrets? Which R&D would not produce a return on investment if patents didn't exist? Drug research, perhaps, though we might be able to find other solutions there, or produce a much more limited form of patent for that industry alone. What else currently depends fundamentally on patents for its business model? Looking at the many groups working on FOSS media codecs past and present (VP8, VP9, AoM, Opus, Vorbis), I'd say the media situation would actually get better in the absence of patents.
- rancur 11y ago
  media requires algorithm which isn't supposed to be patentable but because software is sOoOo complex it got shoehorned into patentability. I think we just need to loosen up the ties a little
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Marketing is at least as important as technology. Intel sells chips, not because there are no alternatives, but because they're Intel. There will be little or no impact on innovation by this patent change.

radu_floricica 11y ago

This is a bad question and a horrible attempt to answer (I'm being so abrasive because at this moment this is the highest voted comment). It's a bad question because it invites wishful thinking. Prediction generally has a very bad track record, and right now you're trying to predict a mixture of economy, free market incentives and technology. Hard to find something more unpredictable. What you can do is look at the past and find correlation and causation. It's reasonably straightforward. Take a number of drugs and treatments, best if done randomly. See the process that got them on the market, and try to figure where patents fit in the picture. I tried it just for fun, and found something interesting: up to half a century ago, you had a person's name associated with a drug. More recently, and you have a company. This is not an answer, but a hint that maybe things move towards being more expensive. Which of course brings us to the regulatory process: once a drug identified, what is the cost of having the papers stamped and who is motivated to pay for it?

jerednel 11y ago

Wasn't the completion of the genome in the first place a public effort that actually beat the private sector's attempts to finish it first and keep it away from scientific research? So not sure what we'd lose from keeping it open.

SilasX 11y ago

You can always waive IP rights in a system that reverse is not true (i.e. conditionally opt-in to IP rights in a system that categorically rejects them). Likewise, you can give away all the physical stuff you want, but it's great that the rights exist in the first place.